"True religion and undefiled is let every one quietly have earth to
manure."

Winstandley

(Founder of the digger's 1652 England)

"Each man went into the woods in the place where it was darkest and there
was no path, for they thought it would be a shame to go in a group."

(Joseph Campbell was fond of quoting the passage from the legend of the
Holy Grail where the Knights of the Round Table set forth on their quest)

"Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray
to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

-Jeremiah 29:7

"we expect a theophany of which we know nothing but the place, and the
place is called community."

-Martin Buber between Man and Man

"The sin of egotism always takes the form of withdrawal. When
personal advantage becomes paramount, the individual passes out of the
community."

-Richard Weaver (1910-1963)

"Amongst us God….has restored community, as it was in the
beginning….We hope too that amongst us community is as vigorous and
glorious, and is by God’s grace observed with as pure a heart….For not
only have we put all our belongings into a common pool under the care of
deacons, and live from it according to our needs: we praise God through
Christ with one heart and mind and are eager to help one another….Everything
which has served the purposes of self-seeking and private property….eating
and drinking the sweat of the poor….and indeed everything which offends
against love, all such things are abolished amongst us by the power of love
and community…..And indeed no Christian or saint can satisfy God if he
does not live in such a community."

(a pamphlet from Munster Germany 1534)

"Communal living is one of America's Great Alternative
traditions. In a country largely devoted to a laissez-faire individualism,
there has for centuries been a small but stalwart counterflow-a principled
minority who have argued that cooperation is healthier than competition,
that helpfulness is better than hostility, and that living in community with
others is a concrete way in which one can contribute to a better and
brighter human future."

Gone to Croatan

"Attachment to the soil is an inescapable aspect of the healthy
psyche. Uprootedness is a kind of psychosis-sadly, rampant in our
community-less society."

-Martin Lembec (1909-1990)

"Community should not be made into a principle; it, too, should
always satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction. The realization of
community, like the realization of any idea, cannot occur once and for all
time; always it must be the moments answer to the moments question , and
nothing more."

Martin Buber

"Theosophists in other parts of the world thought to establish their own
communities, too, and most of these shared in the general rejection of
mainstream society that has since become the signature of the
counter-culture. This had its most widespread popularity in the 1960s and
70s, but the idea of an alternative society didn't start them. We can trace
some sense of alternative societies back to the Rosicrucian experiment, but
the idea of a counter0culture as we know it emerged in the last decades of
the nineteenth century. This was something more than the "bohemia" of
artists and poets that we associate with Paris and La Boheme. Rather
than living unconventionally but still within society, alternative societies
were just that-alternatives"

Gary Lachman

Politics and the Occult

"Like a necromancer, I can diagnose the modern condition of
rootlessness and longing for community by examining the entrails of my own
soul. I'm a good twentieth-century man. I have carved my individuality out
of the rough marble that was given me, tasted freedom within the confines of
my genetic and historical destiny. I have a rich inner life, and I pay
attention tot he winds of the spirit. i live in complex harmony with my wife
and take pleasure in grown and growing children. I have intimate friends, a
circle of acquaintances, satisfying work, a modicum of fame, financial
plenty, land, and horses. I have a privileged, lucky, or graced life.
nevertheless, something is missing. i can't make out the shape of the void
or trace an outline of the obscure object of my desire but I can name
it-community."

Sam Keen

Hymns To An Unknown God

Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a
complete human being

A Cast
Iron Programme for Communal Activity

(A proposed rule of life written by the New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter
for the Jerusalem Community, a Maori settlement on the Wangunui River in New
Zealand. )

Feed the hungry

Give drink to the thirsty

Give clothes to those who lack them

Give hospitality to strangers

Look after the sick

Bail people out of jail, visit them in jail, and look after them when
they come out of jail;

Go to neighbors funerals;

Tell other ignorant people what you in your ignorance think you know

Help the doubtful to clarify their minds and make their own decisions.

Console the sad

Reprove sinners, but gently, brother and sister, gently

Forgive what seems to be harm done to yourself

Put up with difficult people

Pray for whatever has life, including the spirits of the dead.

Where these things are done, Te Wairua Tapu (The Holy Spirit) comes to
live in our hearts, and doctrinal differences and difficulties begin to
vanish like the summer snow.....

Michael L. Budde & Robert W. Brinlow

The Church as Counterculture

"Over-population and over-organization have produced the modern
metropolis, in which a fully human life of multiple personal relationships
has become almost impossible. therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual
impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and
revive the small country community, or alternatively humanize the metropolis
by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban
equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and
co-operate as complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of specialized
functions.

All this is obvious today* and , indeed, was obvious fifty
years ago. from Hilaire Belloc to Mr. Mortimer Adler, from the early
apostles of co-operative credit unions to the land reformers of modern Italy
and Japan, men of good will have for generations been advocating the
decentralization of economic power and the widespread distribution of
property. And how many ingenious schemes have been propounded for the
dispersal of production, for a return to small scale "village industry." And
then there were Dubreuil's elaborate plans for giving a measure of autonomy
and initiative to the various departments of a single large industrial
organization. there were the Syndicalists, with their blueprints for a
stateless society organized as a federation of productive groups under the
auspices of the trade unions. In America, Arthur Morgan and Baker Brownell
have set forth the theory and described the practice of a new kind of
community living on the village and small town level."

-Aldous Huxley (1958) Brave New World Revisited

"Earth shall be fair, and all her people one:

Nor till that hour shall God's whole will be done.

Now, even now, once more from earth to sky,

peals forth in joy man's old, undaunted cry-

Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!"

The Hymnbook, no 490

"Professor Skinner of Harvard has set forth a psychologist's
view of the problem in his Walden Two, a Utopian novel about a
self-sustaining and autonomous community, so scientifically organized that
nobody is ever led into anti-social temptation and, without resort to
coercion or undesirable propaganda, everyone does what he or she ought to
do, and everyone is happy and creative. In France, during and after the
Second World War, Marcel Barbu and his followers set up a number of
self-governing, non-hierarchical communities of production, which were also
communities for mutual aid and fully human living. and meanwhile, in London,
the Peckham Experiment has demonstrated that it is possible, by
coordinating health services with the wider interests of the group, to
create a true community even in a metropolis."